Exhibits: Curated Collections Exploring Aspects of our History

This exhibition, “The University of Toronto: Snapshots of its history”, was mounted in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in 2002 as a part of the University’s 175th anniversary celebrations. It complemented the launch in March of Martin Friedland’s The University of Toronto: a history, the first such history to appear in seventy-five years.

The discovery of a life-saving treatment for diabetes at the University of Toronto in 1921 made headlines worldwide and was formally acknowledged just two years later when the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to two of the team members. An illustrated timeline of the most significant events that led to the discovery and initial dissemination of insulin is provided here, and the full story with thousands of the original archival documents is available through the UTL's digital special collection entitled The Discovery and Development of Insulin.